Serving as your own general contractor...

Serving as your own general contractor to build that addition on --- your family?

What in the name of heaven are we DOING?

Unable to have a baby of her own, Amy Kehoe became her own general contractor to manufacture one...

Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student ... From [a website] she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.

On another Web site ...Ms. Kehoe found a gestational carrier who would deliver her baby.

Finally, she hired the fertility clinic...which put together her creation last December.

“We paid for the egg, the sperm, the in vitro fertilization,” Ms. Kehoe said as she showed off baby pictures [of twins] at her home near Grand Rapids, Mich. “They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for us.”...

[The infants] are now in the custody of the surrogate who gave birth to them, [after she] obtained a court order to retrieve them after learning that Ms. Kehoe was being treated for mental illness.

Infant humans are commodities, a species of consumer goods, if you can afford to have one constructed, you're entitled to him, huh? or should I say, entitled to "it"?

Surrogacy is largely without regulation, with no authority deciding who may obtain babies through surrogacy or who may serve as a surrogate....

controlled mainly by fertility doctors, who determine which arrangements are carried out and also earn money by performing the procedures. ....

The lax atmosphere means that it is now essentially possible to order up a baby, creating an emerging commercial market for surrogate babies that raises vexing ethical questions.

In some cases, parents must go through adoption proceedings to gain legal custody of the children. But even in those situations, the normal adoption review process is upended. In surrogacy, prospective parents with no genetic link often create their own baby first, then ask for legal approval, potentially leaving judges with little alternative. Some states allow prebirth orders that place the parents’ names on the birth certificates without any screening

Ah, the way I can pre-order a not-yet-published book on Amazon, I see.